When Anna Karenina meets the Fockers

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Now here's an image to boggle the imagination: Leo Tolstoy on
the set of Meet The Fockers. OK, there are some
inconvenient logistical problems to sort out, Tolstoy being dead
not the least of them.

But it's a match made in heaven - the makers of the hit movie
about incompatible in-laws and the author of Anna
Karenina, with its memorable opening sentence: "All happy
families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own
fashion."

There is no proof that Tolstoy had a Robert De Niro-style
character in mind when he wrote that in the 1870s. But some
similarities between the Oblonsky and Focker households suggests
that families, with all their frailties and internal tensions, are
a boundless source of artistic inspiration.

Go back as far as you like. The Bible? Sure. Can you top Cain
and Abel for sibling rivalry, or Abraham and Isaac as a case study
in father-son tension? And what's Greek tragedy if not a sustained
exploration of fraught families?

Tom Lehrer summed up a complex plot perfectly in his song
Oedipus Rex: "When he found what he had done,/ He tore his
eyes out one by one./A tragic end to a loyal son/ Who lo-o-o-o-ved
his mother."

Without family tension as one of his favourite creative tools,
Shakespeare might never have moved on from sonnets. In
Hamlet the eternal triangle is given a twist: mother, son,
scheming stepfather and ghostly dad. In Macbeth, the
father figure, Duncan, is done in by a vacillating husband egged on
by an ambitious wife.

And King Lear still stands as the put-upon patron saint of all
fathers of daughters, unable to keep everyone happy. It is Lear who
speaks one of Shakespeare's most quoted lines: "How sharper than a
serpent's tooth it is/ To have a thankless child."

The parent-child dynamic is crucial to The Godfather,
both the novel and the movies. The whole Mob genre, with The
Sopranos on TV being a recent example, has given a new meaning
to the concept of family. It can be extended to include those
involved in the business, but - as Tony Soprano demonstrates with
his myopic loyalty to flaky, coke-snorting nephew Christopher -
blood ties are ultimately the most important.

The Star Wars movies may end up filed under 'S' for
science fiction, but supporting all those special effects is one of
the oldest stories of them all - the quest for the father. Like
Oedipus and his father, Luke Skywalker comes perilously close to
murdering his own father, Darth Vader. As for Lord of the
Rings, what was Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf but a father figure
to all those child-sized hobbits?

Where are the mothers in all this? Perhaps resident in TV's
Wisteria Lane, wrestling with their own family demons in
Desperate Housewives, further proof that there are no new
stories, only variations on old themes in soaps - and also
songs.

Family struggles of one kind or another provide the back beat to
a lot of modern music. Playing in a band is akin to being in a
long-term relationship, with all the pressures that this can
entail.

The creative tension between John Lennon and Paul McCartney
produced most of the Beatles' finest songs; an unfortunate
aftermath was one of the bitchiest tracks ever recorded - Lennon's
How Do You Sleep?, a public one-finger salute to McCartney on the
solo Lennon's Imagine LP. The conjunction of Sleep
with Oh Yoko, a few tracks on, is like salt and sugar; love
gone sour and new love.

The song-writing team in the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards and
Mick Jagger, have also had their moments, as did the Wilson
brothers in the Beach Boys. Neil and Tim Finn have been in and out
of bands (Split Enz, Crowded House); recorded together and
separately. Even that quintessential pop confection, Abba, found a
frisson of spice when marriage break-ups split the band. The
problem was that half their fans were never sure which boy had been
married to which girl (let alone who sang what). This made
deconstructing The Winner Takes It All a bit tricky.

Bob Dylan deserves much more serious consideration. Or does he?
He has the image of a man laying himself bare in his music,
unashamedly exposing his soul in a track such as Sara, a
love song to his wife that closed the Desire album.

But you shouldn't hold your breath hoping to hear Dylan sing
heartfelt lines such as "Don't ever leave me; Don't ever let go"
any time soon. His marriage to Sara Lowndes ended a few years after
he recorded that song. This could make listening to such an
ostensibly personal track difficult, were it not for the fact that
Dylan himself has warned against taking his work too literally.

After his acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album in 1974,
he said of one of its best known songs, You're A Big Girl
Now: "Well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife
- I don't write confessional songs." As for Sara, one
biographer has this to say: "There are doubts about the literalness
of the song, as certain lines seem patently untrue - such as his
famous one about writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in
the Chelsea Hotel (it is fairly well documented that he wrote it in
Nashville)." So who do you trust - the singer or the song?

In Chronicles Volume I, published last year, Dylan
writes of resisting fame and wanting to be a family man. The way he
tells it, while others saw him as spokesman for a generation, he
leaned towards taking the kids to Little League baseball games. One
of those kids, Jakob, has since had to deal with his dad's musical
legacy by playing in a band himself. Still, it's not quite as
complicated a family saga as the one starring the Wainwright
clan.

In Melbourne recently, a concert was staged by Canadian
musicians Kate and Anna McGarrigle, who are sisters. Also
performing were Kate's adult children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright.
Missing in person, though his presence was almost tangible, was
their father, Loudon Wainwright III, who is also a
singer/songwriter (and occasional actor) and was married to Kate
McGarrigle for six years in the mid-1970s.

One of the show-stoppers of that evening at the National Theatre
came when Martha introduced a song of her own, which she dedicated
to her dad. Its title? Bloody Mother-F---ing Asshole (or
BMFA, as it is often called in polite newspapers). A
visceral howl of rage at perceived parental failings, the song made
for uncomfortable listening - especially for all fathers in the
audience.

BMFA suggests that Martha has hardened her stance
against her dad considerably since 1995, when she sang a duet with
Loudon Wainwright III on Father-Daughter Dialogue.
"Dearest Daddy with your songs/ Do you hope to right your wrongs?
You can't undo what has been done/ To all your daughters and your
son./ The facts are in and we have found/ That basically you're not
around." To which he replies, in part: "Why I'm uptight or not
around/ Those whys continue to confound./ Darling Daughter can't
you see/ The guy singing the songs ain't me."

This is the Dylan defence - hey, don't assume that everything in
the songs is sincere, or about you. Trouble is, it doesn't quite
wash. For well over 30 years, right back to the early 1970s when he
was labelled - you guessed it - a new Dylan, Loudon Wainwright has
been writing and recording personal songs. Album tracks are
footnotes to his life, love affairs and break-ups.

Rufus makes his entrance in Loudon's songs Dilated To Meet
You (on which mum Kate sings harmonies), Lullaby and
- oh yes - Rufus Is A Tit Man. Fast-forward 20 years and
things are much more fraught. In A Father And A Son
("You're starting up and I'm winding down/ Ain't it big enough for
us both in this town?") Loudon also explores his relationship with
his own father, an American journalist of some repute, from whom he
inherited both genes and what he calls "the same weird first
name".

As for Martha, she's also there in Five Years Old,
Pretty Little Martha and Hitting You, an
astonishingly raw song about striking a fractious child during a
car trip - the sort of confession to which most parents can relate,
though few would share.

For better or worse, Loudon is a man who has chosen to live some
of his life in public. In a recent interview with a US newspaper,
he said: "There is some artistic licence taken and downright
hyperbole in some cases. But a number of the songs are certainly
drawn from my life. I don't make any attempt to hide that fact. Of
course, what happens in my life is not unusual, so it's about your
life too. If I'm writing about a divorce or the death of a parent,
that happens to everybody ... I think everybody's life has plenty
of turmoil in it. If they're not aware of it, they're either
extremely lucky or asleep."

What Loudon might have underestimated, however, is the reaction
of some of the subjects of his songs. And while it is hard to
imagine anyone being flattered to have inspired a song like
Martha's BMFA, Loudon seems to have conceded that there is a kind
of poetic justice at work here.

In an interview with Michael Dwyer in The Age early in
February, Rufus Wainwright described how he'd once rung his father
about a song dealing with his abandonment of his family. Before he
had even heard the song, Loudon replied: "Rufus, I've written so
many songs about so many people, that whatever it is, I probably
deserve it." So many songs. Including one with that title (on
Loudon's 1992 record History). So Many Songs is a
poignant track on which harmonies are provided by both Kate and
Anna McGarrigle and - just to make the mix a little bit more
incestuous - Suzzy Roche, to whom Loudon was also once married.

Both Martha and Rufus Wainwright have suggested that they were
always destined to have musical careers because of their parents'
backgrounds. Let's just say that when the McGarrigles and
Wainwrights got together for a family sing-song, the harmonies must
have been exquisite. Rufus, praising his sister's BMFA,
has said: "Musically, the genetic power of my entire family is so
insanely muted that there are certain frequencies that only I can
hear, because we're all related ... I experience it on this whole
other emotional level."

You don't have to be a family member, however, to notice some
differences in the treatment of common themes. While BMFA
has a jagged edge, many of Loudon's more personal tracks are
surprisingly tender. On his 2001 album Last Man on Earth,
he explores a fraught relationship with his own father on a track
called Surviving Twin: "A man becomes immortal/ Through
his daughter or his son/ But when he fears his legacy/ A man can
come undone."

Sort all these records into piles and you have a fragmented
family tree. Kate McGarrigle introduced Rufus on a 1977 album in
First Born Son; five years later, on a later McGarrigles
record, young Rufus and Martha both provide back-up vocals on A
Place In Your Heart. Through the music and lyrics, the course
of relationships can be traced; so too the way these children have
grown up into adults - carrying, it would seem, a fair amount of
emotional baggage.

It's an unusual family that allows strangers even the briefest
glimpse behind the living-room curtains. But family tensions and
family relationships are the wound spring driving an infinite
number of creative works.

British poet Philip Larkin put it most concisely in This Be
The Verse: "They f-- you up, your mum and dad." Greek
tragedians explored a similar idea at greater length. Philip Roth's
Portnoy might have had less to complain about in a different
family. Similarly, if Mario Puzo had granted Michael Corleone other
parents he might have gone into a less bloody line of work and the
word "godfather" would not have such sinister connotations.

We love them, we try to leave them, but there's no escape from
family. In our fumbling, imperfect ways we have to deal with them.
Creative people of all types and in all fields have been tackling
their families since the earliest times, when a caveman or woman
used a burned stick to scrawl an unflattering portrait of a close
relative on a stone wall.

Despite their differences, Tolstoy would understand the
advertising for Adam Sandler's new movie, Spanglish. Which
is, say the posters, "a comedy about the ultimate culture clash ...
family". The ads also say this: "Every family could use a little
translation." What's that in Russian?

Alan Attwood is a Melbourne author and journalist. His 1997
novel, Breathing Underwater, centres on the rather odd Windsong
family.

FROM THE FAMILY ALBUM

The Man Who Loved Children, By Christina Stead.

A scarifying account of a dysfunctional family. The central
character, Sam Pollitt, is based on Stead's father.

The Falls, By Joyce Carol Oates.

Set in the Niagara Falls region, Oates' novel spans almost 40
years, exploring how one incident marks several generations.

Hotel Sorrento, By Hannie Rayson.

A wonderful Australian play about death and acceptance and
sisters trying to come to terms with their past.

Grown Man, By Loudon Wainwright III.

You could pick just about any of his albums but all the big
themes are here: fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, birth and
death.

The Graduate, By Charles Webb (movie version,
1967).

In which a young man puzzles his parents.

A little worried about his future, Benjamin Braddock gets to
know Mrs Robinson and her daughter.

Cloudstreet, By Tim Winton.

The first few lines set the scene: "Will you look at us by the
river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the
dreamy briny sunshine ..." Brilliant.

The Bible

"And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." They did. And
look what problems have been caused by all that begetting.